Cross-Border

As part of the Commission’s Digital Single Market strategy and its plan to boost e-commerce, new laws to tackle geoblocking and promote customer trust through better protection and enforcement were adopted in 2017 and 2018. A new regulation on making cross-border parcel delivery more affordable and efficient is also being in its final stages of adoption.

While domestic online sales in the United States and the European Union will continue to increase — taking sales away from brick-and-mortar stores — growth rates will flatten out over the next 10 years. The most explosive growth will be in worldwide cross-border ecommerce, with the Asia Pacific region leading the way. Research firm Forrester foresees cross-border ecommerce outpacing domestic growth, with a compound annual growth rate of 17 percent between 2017 and 2022, compared with 12 percent for overall B2C ecommerce.

PPRO Group reveals only 7% of enterprises are successfully selling to other EU markets online. Figures have shown that the Netherlands (23%), Hungary (21%), and the Czech Republic (21%) are some of the fastest growing e-commerce markets in terms of percentage growth. The findings also showed that mature markets such as Portugal, France and Germany have also seen high growth in e-commerce payments at 16%, while the UK e-commerce market grew by 15%. But only 7% of EU businesses sell cross-border within the union, according to Eurostat, despite the benefits offered by the single market, and despite the fact that 33% of EU online shoppers have bought something from an online merchant from another European country.